Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The use of mobile computing devices such as laptops, notebook computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and “smart” cellular telephones to access the Internet is becoming increasingly popular. These mobile computing devices enable users to maintain connectivity to the Internet via a wireless connection, even when moving from one location to another. Mobile computing devices have been used for “bursty” applications such as web browsing, which may benefit from high data throughput speed, but generally consume only low to modest data throughput when averaged over the time that they are in use. With the introduction of wireless broadband data services to such devices, much more data-intensive applications are now available to the mobile computing device user, including viewing high-resolution video, downloading very large music or video files, and the like. These data-intensive applications are characterized by requiring moderate to high data-transfer speed for extended periods of time.